Currently I am giving a keynote presentation at the 16th annual SEDA conference in Birmingham. In reality I am sitting at my desk, at home, in Islington, not even talking into a microphone because I recorded the whole thing about three weeks ago.  Being today 36 weeks pregnant with twins we decided it was too [...]

On Wednesday night I had the honour, and pleasure, of attending the National Teaching Fellowship Awards Scheme dinner as I received a National Teaching Award this year from the Higher Education Academy and have now become a National Teaching Fellow.  The ceremony and dinner was held at Middle Temple Hall in London which was a [...]

At the end of June, due to some complications with my twin pregnancy, I was suddenly signed off work, indefinitely.  Scary health issues and related stress aside, I have found this whole experience pretty weird and difficult.  I was 15 weeks pregnant at the time and the prospect of not going back to work for [...]

There is a lot of talk, particularly from politicians about choice at the moment. And the rhetoric implies that choice is always a good thing. Sometimes, it obviously is – choice of Easter cupcake from coffee shop (lemon, chocolate, strawberry); or on a less flippant level, choice about who you vote for, where you live, [...]

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages and given that I have been v v slack with my blogging (I blame pregnancy, seems as good as excuse as any!) seems appropriate to start back with this. So I’ve talked to a few people about the genius coffee and papers idea and I can say [...]

This post is fulfilling a number of functions: summarising a discussion at the Heads of Educational Development Group (HEDG) on Monday about the value of KPIs my notes from Barbara Dexter’s session at the SEDA conference the following day on “Targets and performance measures in educational development: how helpful are they?” and David Baume’s session [...]

In the spirit of the THES #loveHE campaign and also because it is Friday thought a positive post would be appropriate. The other week I had the most ridiculous week, but came out of it strangely positive and with a renewed appreciation of the benefits of working in HE in the UK.

Constructive realignment? UK educational development from the outside Opening keynote from the SEDA conference in Chester was given by David Green from the University of Seattle. David used to work in the UK so gave an interesting perspective on the differences between educational development in the UK and the US.

JISC e-Pedagogy Experts Meeting: Birmingham, October 2010 I went off to the JISC e-pedagogy experts meeting with a dual hat on, I am on the experts group but was also presenting with the cluster group from our JISC curriculum design project.

Today I have vowed to give up my tablet for note taking for 16 weeks (stifles sob).  This is all in the cause of attempting to be a better note taker, sorry, knowledge gatherer, meeting planner, analyst and generally just make the hours that I spend in meetings more effective.